About all that stuff in the title, although not necessarily in that order.

NATIONAL DOG DAY: The swamp, the guest golden & me

Comment

About this blog

By Peter Chianca

Peter Chianca's humor column, 'At Large,' has appeared on more than 100 Gatehouse Media websites and in newspapers around New England and the rest of the U.S. He lives north of Boston with his wife, two kids and an indeterminate number of dogs and
...

Peter Chianca's humor column, 'At Large,' has appeared on more than 100 Gatehouse Media websites and in newspapers around New England and the rest of the U.S. He lives north of Boston with his wife, two kids and an indeterminate number of dogs and cats. He has a lot of songs on his iPod.

You may recall me mentioning how we have four dogs in our household, which you’d think would be enough. But my wife Theresa is of the opinion that you can never have too many dogs around, and once you’ve got two dogs you might as well have 10. This despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, such as the fact that with 10 dogs you have a much higher chance of being trampled on the way to the refrigerator.

We’re not going to adopt more dogs, because that would be weird -- in my mind, the difference between four and five dogs is the difference between “whimsically eccentric” and “does your house always smell like this?” (A lot of people would say that’s the difference between one dog and any larger number of dogs, but whatever.)

So instead, we’ve taken to watching our friends’ dogs when they go away. This time of year that’s quite often, as you can tell when you ring our doorbell and hear as millions of voices bark out in terror and then are suddenly silenced, when we lure them all out the back door with cookies.

What’s funny is, the dogs who stay with us don’t seem the least bit put off by the situation -- they don’t sit by the window sighing or try to burrow under the fence or anything like that. Most of them just seem to be like, “Oh, I guess I live here now. There’s food, right?” Then they jump up and take my space on the bed, which my wife thinks is adorable.

But that’s not to say they don’t have their own little idiosyncrasies. Or in some cases big idiosyncrasies, as we found out this week with a current guest, a golden retriever named Brady, who loves water.

That’s actually an understatement: It would be more accurate to say that Brady has a water problem; to Brady, water is like crack. Once Brady is in the water he sees absolutely no reason to get out of the water, ever, even if it means eventually passing out from exhaustion and sinking to the bottom, never to be seen again. This is why dogs aren’t known as great forward-thinkers -- you don’t see many dog event planners, for instance.

So as a result, when we’re taking Brady out for a walk with our dogs, we have to avoid water completely. And until you’re trying to avoid water when walking dogs in a rural suburb, you don’t really realize how much water is actually out there -- it’s everywhere! And it’s mostly swimmable, at least if you’re a dog and don’t mind water that smells like certain parts of other dogs that you’re always sniffing anyway.

But we made the mistake Friday night of bringing the dogs to a soccer field near our house. Soccer fields are notoriously dry, because otherwise they’d be difficult to use for soccer. But it turns out if you run through the woods next to the soccer field, and down a hill, and across a path, and down a ravine, you’ll find yourself in waist-high swampwater.

And by “you” I mean “me,” since I was the one who chased Brady down that very path when he apparently sniffed out the swamp and took off. Luckily I had the presence of mind to hand my phone off to Theresa -- this way it didn’t get ruined, and she was able to take the above picture of me from the top of the hill wading gamely into the swamp in my sneakers and jeans.

Of course, just reaching the dog is only a small part of the battle when the dog doesn’t want to leave. (“Sweet, sweet water!” you could almost hear him thinking as he paddled away, me tromping after him through the gooey underbrush like Adrian Barbeau in “Swamp-Thing.” Well, not exactly like that.)

Somehow I was eventually able to slip a leash on him and coax-drag him back to shore without him pulling me in any further than my shoulders, which is a good thing because I’m pretty sure if I went under I would have been suckled to death by giant leeches, or turned into the Swamp-Thing (see previous paragraph). To Theresa’s credit, she stopped laughing as much when it looked like the dog and I might completely disappear into the muck. Let’s face it, losing both of us down there would have been pretty hard to explain to authorities.

Then there was the matter of getting him up the ravine, across the path, up the hill and back onto the soccer field. That’s where the phone came in handy again -- we called in reinforcements from my son and nephew, who formed a human chain and helped pull us back up. It was very inspiring, sort of like Hands Across America, if Hands Across America ended with a swamp-encrusted golden retriever and his equally goopy non-owner.

My son -- who finds the fact that we occasionally house “strange” dogs even weirder than the fact that we have four of our own -- was disgusted that I’d gone after Brady in the swamp; he’s of the opinion that if you love someone you should set them free, and if you don’t love someone you REALLY should set them free. And next time I’d be tempted to call the fire department so they could come out in their taxpayer-funded hip waders and do the dirty work. But that doesn’t mean we’ll stop taking dogs in for visits -- despite all the barking and near-tramplings, I can’t deny that having a pack around certainly keeps things interesting.